free103point9 is pleased to announce our 2013 Wave Farm Artists-in-Residence:

Laura Hadden and Tennessee Watson (Brooklyn, NY), Wage/Working

Wage/Working addresses the issues of income inequality and the concept of wage through a time-based transmission installation and radio broadcast series. During their two-month residency Hadden and Watson will be collecting stories and interviews with workers in the Columbia/Greene County community regarding their jobs and their relationship to their work. These stories will be edited to a length, which corresponds with the amount of time it takes them to earn $1, creating an inverse relationship between monetary value and time. This Live Interactive residency is a special partnership between free103point9 and the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Zach Poff + N.B.Aldrich (Brooklyn, NY) Wave Farm Translations

Poff and Aldrich will pursue emergent phenomenon in the Wave Farm's hidden soundscape, translating atmospheric radio, underwater sound, and tiny natural vibrations into outdoor sculptures that encourage listeners to consider the unexpected results of our relationships with each other and our environment. Their project, Wave Farm Translations, will include three phases: Research, Production, and Sharing, which will include a WGXC 90.7-FM interview/playlist, a sensor-building workshop, and complete online documentation.

Redux (Mark Cetilia and Joe Cantrell) (Providence, RI), Song for Søren Larsen

Song for Søren Larsen will take advantage of various aspects of radio and other broadcast media to create a generative audio space enabled by the contributions and commingling of the electromagnetic broadcast spectrum with the bodies of the performers. A network of three recursive audio feedback sub-systems will be used to construct the performance. These systems include short wave loop antenna hardware, low power AM transmission, and the unique opportunity afforded by the Wave Farm residency, access to the full-power signal of WGXC 90.7-FM.

Brian House (Providence, RI), A Striking Clock (working title)

During his residency at Wave Farm, House will invoke the spirit of a town striking clock for the electroacoustic community created by the WGXC transmission. At regular intervals, a short musical piece will be broadcast. However, this piece will not simply count off the hours like a striking clock -- rather, it will be the sonified data of online and physical phenomena within the geographic broadcast area. Data will be gathered from many sources: online content platform APIs such as Twitter, Flickr, etc, filtered geographically; macro environmental measurements including weather and astronomical phenomena; and local sensor systems placed on the grounds of Wave Farm measuring ambient acoustics, motion, electromagnetic qualities, and other conditions.

SPEKTR collective (Aljosa Abrahamsberg, Matthew Biederman, Marko Peljhan, and Brian Springer) (Montreal, Canada) THE DARK SPECTRUM (working title)

THE DARK SPECTRUM follows a series of electromagnetic (EM) spectrum mapping, interception and transmission performance structures, which the SPEKTR collective started exploring in 2004. Their new work in this series will focus on processes of encoding/decoding of the EM spectrum and natural/man made signals. SPEKTR will collectively spend time with a standard suite of tools: HF, VHF, UHF and L-band Receivers and Transmitters software defined radios, home-brew VLF receivers, and ELF probes complimented by software toolkits (COTS and custom coded) to decode, encode and visualize digital signals. Combined with image and audio recording devices and manipulation strategies, the collective will work together to develop new ideas and segments for a new performance focusing on the digital and encoded/encrypted signals domains.

Cammis Buerhaus (New York, NY), Natural Human

Buerhaus will temporarily install multiple spring reverb sculptures on the Wave Farm Property. These sculptures will serve to amplify the two types of sound: Natural Sounds and Human Sound. Natural Sound will be sourced from the property, and will include natural weather systems, physical features of the land, and animal activity. Human Sound will be drawn from spoken texts, which will be informed by transmission and media art resource materials available in the Wave Farm Study Center Library.

Brett Ian Balogh (Chicago, IL), Drone Home

Drone Home is a community action, radio broadcast and robot performance that provides a critique of the use of unmanned drones in warfare and surveillance. It offers an alternative to the centralized, unilateral decision-making paradigm currently employed in drone operation by engaging the communities served by WGXC 90.7-FM  in the collaborative control of a small-scale, unmanned aerial vehicle. Radio listeners will make drawings on a web-based map of free103point9's Wave Farm, which will serve as a flight path for the drone. The drawing coordinates will then be transmitted to the drone using packet radio from the station, and a ground crew will take long-exposure photographs of the flight to capture this path as a light painting. The sum of these actions will stand as an example of using a possibly disruptive and invasive technology for the purposes of community involvement and creative output.

Hethre Contant (Brooklyn, NY) Radio Epi(c)phony from The Weimar Republic


During her residency Contant will further develop a performance for radio based on research about transmission during The Weimar Republic. This research was compiled in her Master's thesis, which received The Distinguished Thesis Award from The New School's Media Studies Department in 2012. Over 90 pages of historical, technical, and theoretical writing addresses a lacuna in media scholarship about the importance of this radio epoch. However, in its academic form, Contant realizes that her research remains limited to a small, rather specific community. A public performance and archival documentation of her proposed performance, makes Contant’s research accessible to a wider public audience.

Sam Sebren (Athens, NY), Re: Search

Sebren is a multidisciplinary artist who began his career in the East Village New York arts scene in the 1980s. A prolific maker, Sebren's visual works take form in installation, collage, painting, photography, video, and public works. His sound-based works have ties to noise and no-genre music (Menlo Park Recordings). More recently Sebren has delved deeply into the medium of radio. At Wave Farm, Sebren will engage in a research project culminating in a un-documentary about the history of radio and of transmission artists.

Aliza Simons (Brooklyn, NY) The Tip Of The Crest Of The Bridge

The Tip Of The Crest Of The Bridge consists of sixteen artist-built low-power FM transmitters. Each transmitter broadcasts a small segment of audio on loop. Together, these audio segments create an overarching sound collage and narrative story constructed from the seventy community radio stations visited by Simons in 2009 and 2010 while living in Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Argentina, Ecuador and the Canadian Arctic.

free103point9's Wave Farm Residency Program provides artists with valuable assistance with which to concentrate on new transmission works and conduct research about the genre using free103point9's resource library. Resident artists perform, are interviewed, and create playlists for a Saturday broadcast on WGXC 90.7-FM, a FM radio station and media project in Greene and Columbia counties, upstate New York.

free103point9's Wave Farm Residency Program is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.